The Eagle & Child

I’m fascinated with how one language relates to another and what that looks like in translation.  One of the special features on Monty Python’s Holy Grail special edition is a scene from the film which was dubbed (i.e. translated) into Japanese with English subtitles translated from the Japanese dub.  It’s fascinating what happens to words [...]

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Wednesday morning in Hermeneutics class, we were discussing Biblical wisdom literature, and Proverbs in particular. Our professor, the esteemed August Konkel, was telling us that Proverbs function like riddles. He then used a cliché as an example: “He ran out of steam.”  The meaning behind this phrase is not self-evident–it requires a context outside of the [...]

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Interesting Hebrew class today.  So far we’ve gone through the alphabet (which is just consonants), the vowels and syllabification and today she explained why the word translated “Jehovah” in the King James Version and as exists in numerous Christian hymns is not actually a Hebrew word and is not, technically, found in the Hebrew Bible. [...]

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Another interesting post in Scot McKnight’s “Translation Tribalism” series: I’d like to contend today that most words are translated in all Bible translations with formal equivalence and that some words are translated more or less in a dynamic, or functional way. In other words, there isn’t really a radical commitment to dynamic equivalence — as [...]

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Scot McKnight has started a series of posts on “Translation Tribalism”: 1 and 2 (so far). From the second post: the authority is the original text, not the translation. The original texts are in Hebrew and Aramaic (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament). The authoritative text is not in English, regardless of how accurate the [...]

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Well, how’s this for a kick in the pants: Zondervan will “discontinue putting out new products with the TNIV” (Today’s New International Version.  via Brad Boydston).  It’s kind of a vague phrase: does it mean simply that they’ll continue to publish what they’re already publishing, but nothing new?  Or do they mean that they are [...]

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These days I’m fascinated by the various translations.  Not too long ago I said that the NRSV was becoming my translation of choice.  Four months later and I bought a copy of the TNIV (Today’s New International Version) and have been reading up on it.  The TNIV is essentially an updated version of the NIV [...]

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Which translation of the Bible do you use? (AKA, my defense of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible) I grew up with the New International Version (NIV)—standard text, I think, for my generation of evangelicals—and I still use it: I use an NIV Thompson Chain Reference Bible and have an exhaustive concordance based [...]

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